Sunday, October 23, 2016

Staunton, October 23 – Russians and
many in the West have come to believe that “dedovshchina,” the notorious
practice in which draftees in the Russian military with longer service
routinely oppress those with less, has been defeated and that the military is
now focused on military training rather than building houses for senior
officers.

The military does what it can to
hide these events, she continues, not only by making it difficult for
journalists and others to find out the facts but also by inculcating the idea
among soldiers and the population that anyone who complains is “a mama’s boy”
who lies in order to avoid the rigors of military life.

But as she points out, that is what
the military has “always said, in the 1980s and in the 1990s. But then we were
not yet a great power being reborn.” The fact that such complaints do surface
and that there is real evidence that they are true is disturbing not only for
the soldiers but for Russians who see the army as a defender of the nation.

Yegorova says her newspaper received
a letter of despair from a soldier in a unit based in Kryazh near Samara.The unit, she discovered, has a bad local
reputation. Two-thirds of its soldiers are from the Caucasus or Tuva; but even
Russians who have the chance to serve there and thus remain close to home avoid
it.

The local media and activists from
the Soldiers’ Mothers Committee generally have avoided talking about conditions
in this unit. They weren’t even able to give Yegorova the telephone number of the
unit; she found it only after much effort and got to see the soldier involved
only by claiming that she was his girlfriend and pregnant.

“This was an improvisation,” she says,
but “it worked.”Ethnic Russians in the
unit form only a third of the personnel, he told her. Draftees from the North
Caucasus and Tuva form the rest. The latter form groups and “enjoy definite
privileges from the command,” including the ability to enforce order by
violence. The Russian soldiers keep quiet lest they suffer more.

Yegorova asked the soldier why he hadn’t
written home about this, and he replied that he “didn’t want to agitate them.”
Moreover, he added, “it’s better that they don’t try to do anything. Otherwise
it will become worse for everyone.”

North Caucasians and Tuvins who don’t
do what the commanders order, including work not required of soldiers under the
law, are given warnings; Russians who don’t do what they are told are beaten up
by the North Caucasians or the Tuvans with the silent approval of the
commanders, the soldier said.

The North Caucasians, he continued,
are able to do so even without having special weapons. They use their fists
because “the majority of them are physically well-prepared and many have a
background in fighting.” They are stronger as well because they go about in
groups rather than alone, the soldier said.

Making the situation worse, Yegorova
says, is the fact that the soldiers are not given the supplies they need. The
last batch of draftees were not given anything except summer clothes – and not
enough of them. Some of them even have to sew up their uniforms at night
because they had only one set.

When the session with this soldier
was about over, the Moscow journalist says, she felt “shame” that she had so
little food to give him, something he clearly needed because he appeared
malnourished.“He reassured me,” she
adds, that had she given him some, the others “would have taken it away from
him,” presumably by force.